Fellis dosed first and he didn’t wait for me. I drank my dose, that pink syrup, and it tasted different than the last time, as if the methadone were incomplete, like some chemist and a man in a black suit were in a white sterile room still trying to right the recipe. I wish I hadn’t lost my take-homes and didn’t have to come here every single day—you miss one appointment and they get all upset and act like you fucking murdered someone. I have to get off this shit.

Outside, Fellis sat in the passenger seat, snoozing, the keys in the ignition.

“Sneaky bastard,” I said. I started the truck, wondering if he’d feel bad if I wrecked both his truck and myself. I left the clinic with Fellis snoring.

. . .

Fellis still lived with his mom, Beth. I lived with her too. Rent-free. I found it funny how Beth was a schoolteacher but also a cold-blooded gossiper. She knew everything, and what she didn’t know she made up and it became so. She told people I paid rent, but that was only a front. She knew I had the real stories about her, like how much of Fellis’s bullshit she covered up throughout the years.

My own mother didn’t talk to me anymore. Beth had run into her at the grocery store one weekend, and she told Beth to tell me that she sold all my stuff. Mom had owed me money, and so I hadn’t seen the big deal in selling the small ash baskets she kept in the shed, as well as the picture frames and jewelry she didn’t even wear. That was what happened, why I was at Beth’s—Mom was pissed at me, wouldn’t let me stay with her anymore. But the story Beth told everyone who asked was that my mom was charging me too much rent, and that was why I left her place for good. That became the story. Sometimes I believed that version.

I parked the truck in the driveway behind Beth’s car. Fellis’s aunt Alice had parked her blue Elantra alongside the road. Her daughter was probably with her too. No one left Lily alone since the Daryl crap.

I shook Fellis. “Get up,” I said. “Look awake for your auntie.”

Fellis rubbed his eyes. “I should have took a half.”

Fellis’s house was cluttered. Beth wasn’t a hoarder—just depressed. Empty boxes and years of student papers were stacked in the living room. In the kitchen, dirty dishes filled the sink, always left uncovered at night. One night I woke Fellis and told him I heard noises—Goog’ooks, I said, spirits wanting food—and he told me to shut up, that it was the pipes in the walls.